Frontier Fellowship: Erin Mallea

June 12, 2020 - July 12, 2020

Erin Mallea is a multidisciplinary artist based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her art practice is rooted in a generative research process in which she maps social dynamics and politics embedded within relationships to land and the environment. Working in video, sculpture, and photography, Erin often collapses natural and national history to examine taxonomies and systems of producing knowledge, national memory, and ideology within natural and cultural landscapes. She enacts a methodology of site-specific fieldwork that is analytical and playful to amplify and scrutinize embedded cultural and institutional assumptions and histories. Contextual, processual, and sometimes public in nature, Erin’s work often implicates herself as an individual navigating local organizations, bureaucratic systems, archives, and institutions of memory.

She has exhibited and produced educational programming nationally. Erin has used a picnic table beside a lake in the Mt. Hood National Forest as a collaborative art-making space, presented a proposal to the Allegheny County chapter of the “Colonial Dames of America” advocating for the ethical memorialization and representation of an historic oak tree, and recently spent the summer with biologists to learn more about conservation and land- use in the rural Mountain West. Erin is currently a MFA Candidate (‘19) at Carnegie Mellon University.

What about Green River & the Frontier Fellowship excites you most?

I am eager to spend time under the Utah summer sky, and learn more about Green River’s past and present.